In the beginning was the rat and the rat was with god and the rat was god and the rat layed itself down to be picked at by onions. For the end or there is no end, or for the man with no description for he is not a bear and is not lipstick and is not the regularity of nature nor the fundamental pillar of all creation swinging from the stars or shaped like a curlicue.

Deeply prejudiced but gentle rat. Legislative rat. Rat beginning and ending with a bang. The lord rat running from our eating of him as he hurls all things towards their inestimable nothings, towards miracle somethings, into miracle peristalsis, miracle throat, towards Sam Dordoni in the belly of a rat. Glory be to the graviton, to the rubber-slinged and soulful. Glory to the beard. We've come here to contemplate one life, with the Lord our rat sitting in his own stomach chasing his tail, in a hall of mirrors in tactile 3D where you can fall into the mouth of a reflection and find deep inside another one to fall into. At the bottom of the mouth is another mouth.

Returning to Canada after three years in Japan, Calgarian (now a resident of Vancouver) Jonathon Wilcke released his first trade collection of poetry, pornograph (2004), published by Red Deer Press. It makes me wonder about Red Deer, with rumours after Wilcke’s collection was published, that the press isn’t publishing poetry anymore. Considering only this and Ian Samuels’ premiere collection (to my knowledge), Cabra (2000) have appeared from the press over the past seven years, I become unsure as to what the difference is.

An impressive first collection, pornograph is made up of breaks and fragments, chunks and clusters of prose and overlapping texts as a single unit, woven together nearly seamlessly through seven sections: heads of senate; boeuf (for Fred Wah); fits all’ parfum; jaw; debut; and jackbooty.

Pauses pregnancy. My other car is a chassis. Bill Cosby appears in myliving room making him okay, just like me. Easy chair, easy peasy. Steeltoes. First it’s a pet and then it’s guts. A pet gut. A gut rot. Morningmake-up, two-faced at the office. The breast is a miracle of modern scientists.Populace as diverse as soup. (pp 17, 19, boeuf (for Fred Wah)

and she, a shell, filled with what voidhe could afford, that she couldbarely hold or re(f)use,midway through the coup ifit was that, e(r)go the summaryincluded not a shred of judgment,and his candor floppedduring the delivery, whichexercise emitted revelationafter revelation pointed else-where she could disassociatein fewer words than he

Somewhere, a garage door goes down. Thus, a fiction begins. Clouds gather, disperse. Let this suffice as a working formula for working a formula; what I’m coming to terms with—repetition’s liberating constraint. What occurs in the courtly world has little currency to those taking up arms against it. What I’m coming to terms with builds what which contains the components to construct an evolving sense of entropy. The grand narrative the end of narratives had had had had no grandiose ending. It is as though in removing its mask the landscape shows on its face an expression one recognizes but is unable to immediately place.